Global warming says that the world as an average will get warmer. The average projection is that overall, in 50-100 years, the temperature will be about 2.2degC (about 4degF) warmer than it is today.

This will affect colder areas significantly more than warmer areas, so you will see warmer weather in Boston but temperatures in the tropics will increase very little.

Night temperatures will be affected more than day.

Of course this means that in the Arctic and the Antarctic, temperatures will be impacted most of all. In fact, you can now grow vegetables in Greenland, which was only possible in the last year or so.

The concern is that the arctic ice packs will melt and cause sea levels to rise. The amount this will happen varies from zero to many feet, depending on how alarmist you are willing to be.

If sea levels increased enough, island nations like Tuvalu and low-lying areas like Florida could be endangered.

Of course for you in Michigan, I would be surprised if overall global warming wasn't unalloyed good news - what you would notice is that the weather is less unpleasant.

Recently, a cooling trend has been noticed due to lower sunspot activity which has the potential to entirely override the concern about global warming and perhaps cause a new ice age, which might make us wish we had kept our low-mileage SUVs and incandescent light bulbs.

It would be extremely difficult if not impossible to stop global warming if in fact it is a sustained trend. The Kyoto agreement, which you may have heard of, was supposed to reduce greenhouse gases. It's not working; those who signed it found ways to evade its restrictions. But it hardly matters since the changes proposed by Kyoto, if honestly implemented, would only change the temperature increase by about 1/10th of a degree -- not enough to matter except in symbolic terms.

To truly stop global warming, we would have to stop most industrialization on our planet, and nobody realistically says this is possible. So essentially, despite all the screaming and yelling about this issue, we will not be able to prevent global warming.

It is the position of Bjorn Lomborg and others that we should simply try to mitigate the effects of global warming, by seawalls and other man-made preventative features, instead of going on a Quixotic quest to prevent it from happening.

As you can probably tell, I agree with his position, particularly since I see benefits to global warming that you and I, living in cold parts of the world, will see.

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D

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